Ever wondered what it would be like to put a bunch of programmers and consultants in a low-risk environment and hand them a problem to test their endurance?? Well, that’s what a “hackathon” is all about. 
What are Hackathons?
Hackathons sum up to be an event where social coders and like-minded people come together in groups to brainstorm and build a solution for a possible pressing issue in a safe environment. Hackathons can be open-sourced, inviting coders everywhere, or just within the company! 
In recent times, it’s common for many software development and tech consulting companies to organize hackathons in which the participants are presented with targeted challenges to overcome as a team. The timeline can be anywhere between a day to a week, depending on the themes and objectives.
What do Hackathons do?
Now that we have an idea about what hackathons are, let’s dive into what they bring to the table in terms of company growth. Well, here are a couple of things that hackathons do:
Open New Learning Avenues: Hackathons are a great place to build up the confidence to present your pitch, cross-referencing your ideas with others, and possibly learn new techniques and technologies. Plainly put, hackathons are where you can practically test out what you learned as a theory. 
Raise up the Innovation Factor: Hackathons attract many people from various disciplines and fields. This diversity most certainly helps you to self-analyze your ability and how you can harness it. Brainstorming ideas results in an effective and efficient problem-solving approach for software challenges, workflow issues, or new product development.
Grow your Professional Network: During the hackathon, you have countless possibilities of meeting new people on a professional level, be it either during team-matching sessions or simply competing against each other. Besides learning new techniques, you can learn about your capabilities and treat the hackathon as a job fair. 
So, what are we doing?
At MST, we are all about having a growth mindset. Every year, we organize an internal hackathon for all our techies. And this year, the only difference was that the hackathon happened virtually. With the pandemic at large, everyone’s focus was on healthcare industry and optimizing this industry was the core of 2021’s Vlocity based healthcare domain hackathon. We had a week-long event between the 4th and 8th of October. Nine Eight teams pushed all the buttons on innovative solutions, be it finding a doctor, import FHIR data as per HL7 FHIR R4 standards, insurance services, or e-consultation service, just to name a few!
Empowering with Vlocity:
Each team had a presentation and an actual demo of what they proposed as a solution with their use cases. The expected benefits revolved around better patient mapping, customer experience, cost-effective treatments while easing out on both the patient and the physician using the right set of technologies. And because Vlocity is based on Salesforce, the flexibility and future-proofed tech stack are more straightforward to configure for IT teams, making it a dream choice.
Overall, this year’s hackathon helped us understand new avenues on Vlocity with a lot of unique industry demands within the healthcare domain.
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